The present invention generally relates to message communication channels and, more particularly, to a message compression encoder and encoding method designed to increase the throughput of a message communication channel.
Existing communication channels, both military and commercial, are typically used to full capacity. To increase the volume of messages carried by these communication channels, it would be highly desirable to increase their throughput. One way to accomplish increased throughput is to reduce the number of bits needed to encode the messages by use of a message compression code technique.
Message compression code techniques have been used successfully heretofore to accomplish increased message throughput in communication channels that are noise-free. Noise-free channels are ones with noise levels so low that the received communication signal can be processed to recover the originally transmitted binary sequence without errors.
However, conventional message compression code techniques which have been successfully applied to noise-free communication channels cannot be applied problem-free to noisy communication channels. One major problem that has prevented their use in noisy channels is that a one-bit error in a reconstructed binary sequence can lead to many successive variable length code words being misidentified and therefore decoded in error.